I'm making this post under the advisement of a Blackmagic Design technical support representative. Our post-facility is currently doing dailies on a major studio/network production (to remain un-named for client privacy, of course), and this week, we were delivered our first-ever batch of footage filmed using ProRes RAW on the DJI Inspire 2.

To our knowledge, the only way to process this footage (as of early August 2018) in any capacity is by using Final Cut Pro X 10.4.3 on Mac OS High Sierra, which is what we did (RAW to Log Conversion at DJI D-Log, transcoded to an established, universally supported ProRes variant). According to the DI house on this project, these transcodes will effectively be considered the "master" files for finishing purposes, not the original camera source files, as they themselves have no other way of working with the source material.

I would not categorize this as an ideal workflow, to say the least. We ended up more than doubling our media ingest for these cards, and still had to re-process them using our dailies software for metadata, second-system audio sync and DNxHD/DAX rendering. Not to mention that working within FCP X is in itself...not entirely conducive to an efficient dailies workflow, or at least one that works well for us.

I suppose the purpose of this post is to let the BMD Resolve developers know that there are major studio productions that are beginning to shoot with ProRes RAW, and that as this format increases in popularity (as I'm sure it will, because the relative size compared to other metadata-controllable RAW formats is indeed incredibly small), it will become critically necessary for software such as (perhaps especially) Resolve to support ProRes RAW on both a dailies and finishing level. It would please me to no end to be able to by-pass FCP X in this regard.

Thanks all! Would love to hear from other productions that have seen ProRes RAW being filmed - from what we can glean from our network of partner houses/vendors, this is one of the first (if not THE first) major studio production to use it.

Just speculating but I’d expect support for ProRes raw to be available in Resolve 15.x shortly after the six month exclusive license expires which is coming up in another month or so I believe. BMD may already have defined all the features of the release candidate for Resolve 15.0, but I’m thinking 15.1 will include ProRes raw in the fourth quarter.

Sorry that’s likely too late for your project but I hope your extra effort until then is at least financially rewarding for the hoops you had to jump through.

6 months of preventing what? All NLEs etc to add support for ProRes RAW, so there is actually a good reason to use it in camera?Great idea Apple/Atomos stopping support in area which has nothing to do with creation of ProRes RAW (which I assume Atomos had some interest to be exclusive).

Up-front talks/development with NLE providers is exactly what you want when you try to introduce new codec. Well done Apple and rest to do everything to actually stop it This is not very good way to promote FCP X either.